Interview by Thomas Roueché
Portrait by Ali Golsorkhi-Ainslie

TR  Your first book, Notes on a Foreign Country (2017) was broad in scope, while From Life Itself is focused on a specific neighbourhood.

SH The first book was a critique of white, Western foreign correspondents being in foreign countries and trying to understand them. I said everything I had to say on that subject, but I was still living in Turkey, and I thought maybe I could find a new way of writing. I was very influenced by M. Gessen’s book, The Future is History (2017), which was pretty groundbreaking in trying to understand the psychology of a country. I had first gone to Karagümrük, the neighbourhood that the book centres on, for a magazine story about how Syrian refugees and the local Turkish people were getting along, and I loved working on that so much that I decided to keep going with it and follow the neighbourhood over the next decade. Of course, over time the story and the neighbourhood changed dramatically

TR Could you say more about Karagümrük?

SH I had never been there but I went to a neighbourhood next door called Sulukule to have dinner with some friends who had just moved to the area. After dinner we were talking about how Istanbul was changing and they said, “You have to take a walk down the main street of Karagümrük, because all of the shops are Syrian now.” So I did that, and indeed there were a lot of Syrian shops. They looked very well established. This was 2015 so we were already three years into the so-called “refugee crisis”. I knew enough about Karagümrük to know that this influx of newcomers could potentially be a problem. The neighbourhood is known for the mythic figure of the kabadayı, an urban cowboy or neighbourhood tough guy. It was known for the mafia, for organised crime, and in the 1970s it was a hub for far-right nationalist politics. Its football team, Fatih Karagümrük, is the main rival to Kasımpaşa’s, which is the neighbourhood in which Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan grew up.

TR Your book contrasts Erdoğan with the muhtar, or the local mayor of the neighbourhood. Was it clear when you met the muhtar that he would be at the heart of your book?

SH Whenever journalists go to a small town or specific neighbourhood in Turkey, they speak to the muhtar first. This man, Ismail, was very funny. From the first moment I met him, he was telling stories and jokes. He was in his 60s, and he had grown up in the neighbourhood. Despite being a tough guy – he’d been a boxer in his youth – he had a nuanced take on Istanbul’s history. He said that he missed the Greek population that he had grown up with when he was quite young, and that had been expelled following riots in 1955, and then again in the 1960s. He came from a nationalist context, but he had a tenderness towards Istanbul’s historic diversity. To me, he seemed like a foil to Erdoğan; they’re both the same age, from the same city, different neighbourhoods but the same background, both were athletes. But they were very different. Ismail was religious to some degree; but he was by no means an Islamist. So I wanted to tell the history of the country through their lives and stories, because I thought it would be a good way of bringing Erdoğan’s story down to earth.

TR Writing about Erdoğan is the central conundrum for any writer or journalist engaging with Turkey. Sometimes it can be easy to lose the individual behind the facade.

SH As a journalist, I never went and interviewed him. I lived in Istanbul from 2007 to 2019, and his voice was a part of my daily life, we all lived and breathed him because he was everywhere, always on TV. That sense of omnipresence was something I could write about, alongside history books and biographies. I selected details that I thought were evocative. What you can do is understand what a figure like that might have gone through during those years.

TR Journalists often resolve this by automatically lumping him in with the other authoritarians.

SH The problem I have always had with the strongman theory, is that it never made sense with my experience of living in Turkey under Erdoğan. Of course he used populist rhetoric, but he came onto the scene as a different sort of figure. The grievances he was talking about were not made up. He went to neighbourhoods like his own, and listened to people. He understood what their lives were like and he created a politics of that experience. People who disliked him and his party, the AKP, were nonetheless very impressed by what this party had done. What ordinary people remember is things like the fact that they received better health care. This is really different from someone like Trump.

TR Your book contextualises the migration of Syrians into Turkey with the longer history of internal migration.

SH Erdoğan and Ismail’s politics and attitudes were very much shaped by the migrant experience. In Ismail’s case, by anger that new people were moving into what he considered to be “his” Istanbul. It was interesting for me to have that opinion voiced by someone like Ismail rather than someone from the secular, Kemalist elite. Erdoğan’s family was part of that migrant population. It is the story of Istanbul that in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, each decade there was a new wave of migration, and each time, those new migrants were looked down upon and complained about. When the Syrian refugees came, people said the same things: they don’t know how to walk down the street, they hang their laundry outside and so on. I wondered if the Syrians would eventually be folded into the Turkish experience as well; I don’t think it turned out that way.

TR Your book ends with a grim sense of how things are in Turkey. Was it difficult to find a conclusion?

SH On one trip to Turkey, I asked people from different backgrounds, “What do you wish you had done differently to fight against Erdogan?” What they said was surprising to me, which is that they said very calmly, I wish I had forced our main opposition party to change much earlier. When the autocrat comes to power, this charismatic force of nature, you have to realise that the old world is dead, and you have to recognise that your old way of doing things needs to be transformed too. We haven't seen anyone do that in the US, for sure, except for perhaps Zohran Mamdani..